State and street pejorative for an Iranian woman whose hijab is judged non-compliant. The working category used by Gasht-e Ershad, the morality police.
Once a woman is labeled bad-hijab by police, an informer, or a state outlet, she is exposed to fines, detention, dismissal from work or school, and physical force. The label is the legal hinge for everything that follows.
Bad-hijab is the bureaucratic version of a slur. It sounds like a category, it functions like an insult, and in Iran it functions like a warrant.
Bad-hijab is the word any learner of Persian needs to recognize to follow news coverage of Iran from 2022 onward. Translating it neutrally as improperly veiled loses the policing apparatus behind it.
بد حجاب (bad-hijab), literally bad-hijab, is the Iranian state’s working category for a woman whose veiling is judged insufficient. The label predates the 2022 protests by decades and is the operational basis for Gasht-e Ershad, the morality police, to stop, question, fine, or detain women on the street. Mahsa Jina Amini was arrested under this label on 13 September 2022 in Tehran and died in custody three days later. The word travels from official memos into state TV into the mouth of an angry shopkeeper. It is a slur dressed up as a policy classification, and the dressing is exactly what gives it force.
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